Once a surprise to physicists, these particles are useful tools inside and outside the realm of particle physics. Every minute, countless muons rain down from space, passing through ...

In 2023, the ALICE experiment was ready for their best year yet, until a mysterious signal threatened everything. As the LHC wraps up its 2025 lead-ion run, physicists recall how they worked together ...

Photons, for centuries both a puzzle and a tool, continue to help scientists illuminate nature at the smallest and largest scales. Photons, the fundamental particles of the electromagnetic field that ...

A team of young scientists paused their new physics searches to develop an innovative machine-learning tool, which is now helping them narrow in on a rare and messy decay of the Higgs boson. Physicist ...

A large and unexpected excess of top quark pairs has the physics community excited, but the interpretation is still up for debate. In 1995, Alexander Grohsjean cut out a story from the local German ...

The LHCb experiment at CERN has revealed a fundamental asymmetry in the behavior of particles called baryons. “The reason why it took longer to observe CP violation in baryons than in mesons is down ...

The Planck scale sets the universe’s minimum limit, beyond which the laws of physics break. In the late 1890s, physicist Max Planck proposed a set of units to simplify the expression of physics laws.

Nobel Laureate Peter Higgs died earlier this year. Twelve years ago this week, physicists discovered the particle that bears his name. When researchers at the Large Hadron Collider announced the ...

The ATLAS collaboration recently measured the strength of the strong force to a record level of precision, but there’s still a long way to go toward understanding this fundamental force. In September, ...

Electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force are two distinct fundamental forces. That wasn’t always the case. How many fundamental forces are there in our universe? For particle physicists, answering ...

In the 1900s, Albert Einstein unified the concepts of space and time, giving us a useful new way to picture the universe. At the start of the 20th century, physicists had a problem: The speed of light ...

To understand why scientists are excited about detecting a new background, just look to the history of studies of the CMB. There’s a new cosmological background in town. In June, researchers from the ...